


Thief

by skitzofreak



Series: the foundations we are built on [1]
Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Gen, Jyn is a thief, Set during the movie, knitting together the scenes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-17
Updated: 2018-06-17
Packaged: 2019-05-24 13:24:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,678
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14955500
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/skitzofreak/pseuds/skitzofreak
Summary: Theft, she thinks as she brushes past a harassed-looking hangar chief (and casually slides the credit chit from his pocket into her own), is an ugly business, but it’s how she survives. And at the moment, with clean clothes on her bruised back and a meal in her starved stomach, it’s hard to feel too bad about it.





	Thief

 

It starts, of course, with theft. Jyn strides into the rebellion’s headquarters with her wrists in shackles and her head held high, blood burning and fists clenched. She’s ready to lie, ready to run, ready to claw her way out of whatever damn trap she’s caught in this time. A big Human male with eyes like flint and a scowl like indigestion rips off all her masks in front of a shadowy room full of strangers (one of whom is a person dressed all in flowing white, as if Jyn isn’t on edge _enough_ ), and then they throw her absent fathers in her face and demand that she meet the one to find the other. She clenches her teeth, but she agrees (what chance does she have, if she tries to refuse?)

Another man unlocks her shackles. His scowl is just as deep as the first one; in fact, he seems identical to his superior. Shorter, thinner, darker, but the same wary movements, the same pained twist to his grimace when the lady in white orders Jyn’s wrists to be unchained.

Except he glances up, meets her eyes as the shackles click open, and there is caution there, yes, but also a touch of desperation that makes her stomach squirm in recognition, and a weariness that she can feel resonate down to her toes. Jyn’s breath catches in her chest at the familiarity of his expression, at the sudden sense that this person knows exactly what it feels like to be hunted across the universe, what it feels like to be alone. His eyes flick from her face to her wrists and back up again, his thumbs brush across the thin skin of her inner wrists, and his lips tighten, his chin tilts down – for just a moment, he looks like he is about to say something, do….something. Reach out, maybe, Jyn doesn’t know but she can feel it hanging in the air between them like a storm. _Are you just like…?_

He steps back abruptly, turns away from her and toward the people who are clearly his superiors, and sets the shackles down on the glowing console between them all. In an offhand voice tells her that he will meet her in the hangar, then moves to talk privately with the woman dressed in white and the tall man. She almost believes that he didn’t notice the odd moment that passed between them, except he makes a point of not looking at her as he walks around the round table, even when the angle of his path would force his gaze to naturally fall on her. It doesn’t bother her. There’s no “it” to bother about. So she’s not bothered.

As he walks past her, she slips his ident badge from his belt and tucks it up her sleeve.

The badge gets her access to a console just outside of the command center (and these people are letting her walk around completely unguarded, unsupervised – ah, that explains the twin looks of anguish on the Intelligence officers’ faces, when the lady in white ordered Jyn freed.) To be honest, she doesn’t really need the ident badge to get into the console – it’s an old model, and the operating system is practically defunct, but at least she doesn’t have to spend five minutes slicing through the clunky interface to find what she’s looking for. The spy’s ident gives her access to his files - Captain Cassian Andor, Rebel Intelligence, and cleared higher than she expects. All his actual mission reports are not accessible on this system; there must be a closed system just for Intel that doesn’t connect to the rest of the Alliance’s holo and security net. She’s grudgingly impressed by that security measure, at least.

It’s not his mission files that interest her right now, anyway.

She scrolls a little farther into his data until she finds…shit, the most meager profile she’s ever seen for a member of any military. His homeworld is listed as Fest (wherever the hells that is), he was recruited in the year [REDACTED], he’s qualified to fly six different small-craft ships and to work shifts as a supervisor in the droid maintenance bays. No family mentioned. No birthdate or psych profile, nothing that can tell her who he is. Nothing that can tell her why she’s even looking.

Jyn shakes her head, glances around the busy hangar. No one’s paying her the slightest attention, and it’s almost as grating as the constant sensation of being watched that she survived on Wobani.  She bends her head and scrolls a little farther on the console screen. There’s not much else this badge will give her, but there must be _something_ …ah, there! Captain Andor also has access to the quartermasters, and what looks like a high priority for requisitions.

Now _that,_ she can use.

Two hours later, she’s dressed in the first clean clothes she’s worn in six months, (relatively) new boots on her feet and a scarf around her neck that’s faded but warm. The quartermaster (a smiling Twi’lek in a colorful but highly impractical layered skirt) even throws in a serviceable satchel full of toiletries and spare socks when she hears that Jyn is headed out on a mission. Jyn makes an effort to chat politely with her, largely to keep the woman from glancing too close at the ident badge she’s technically assigning all the gear to. She even manages to sweet talk a set of severe-weather gear from the cheerful quartermaster, things like a rain poncho and a reinforced comm-link cap and spare grip gloves.

Jyn walks out of the quartermaster’s better equipped than she’s been in…years, actually. Aside from the clothes, she also has a vibroblade she nicked from a Bothan and a pocket-sized med kit she lifted from a careless medical tech who left her cart of medical supplies unattended. Jyn even found her way into the mess hall and snagged a meal that now sits comfortably in her belly and upgrades her mood significantly.

Theft, she thinks as she brushes past a harassed-looking hangar chief (and casually slides the credit chit from his pocket into her own), is an ugly business, but it’s how she survives. And at the moment, with clean clothes on her bruised back and a meal in her starved stomach, it’s hard to feel too bad about it.

The spy is waiting for her in the hangar just inside the door she walks through – and that makes her pause, because there are a dozen different doorways leading from the hangar to the rest of the temple compound, and he can’t have known which one she would choose. Unless…she lifts a hand and brushes it against the ident badge tucked in her pocket and raises an eyebrow at him.

“Tracker chip,” he agrees calmly, and Jyn narrows her eyes.

“Well played,” she says in as unaffected a tone as she can muster, stepping close and tapping the card against his chest. He takes it without comment, and she ought to leave it at that, let him have his tiny victory, but as his fingers close on the badge, she meets his eyes again and it’s the same as before, the wariness, the exhaustion, but now there’s also just a hint of humor. She finds herself opening her mouth again, and to her own exasperation hears herself ask, “How did you know I’d take it?”

The spy, Andor, quirks his mouth at the corner and holds up the badge between two fingers. “Thief,” he says mildly.

Jyn does not smile in response to his gentle teasing tone…but she thinks about it.

“Come on,” he tells her, pushing off the wall he’s leaning on and picking up the bag at his feet, slinging it and a heavy looking parka under his arm. “Ship’s this way. We’ve got a long trip ahead of us.”

 _And it may not be as bad as I expected_ rises unbidden in Jyn’s mind, until she stomps it back down. Down that path lies betrayal and pain, and she’s not going there. She’s been there too many times. Sure, he seems…nice enough. He hasn’t said a word about all the gear she conned from the quartermaster under his tab. He hasn’t tried to play off her miscalculation as some kind of intellectual victory over the dumb criminal girl. And there’s something she kind of likes about how easily their steps match as they stride through the hangar to a U-Wing parked on the far edge of the tarmac.

At the U-Wing, Andor is called away to speak to his superior one last time (the skin on the back of Jyn’s neck tightens, and the way General Hardass keeps peering at her over his subordinate’s shoulder sours all of her fragile good mood). Jyn occupies herself with rummaging through his bag instead. The droid in the cockpit stares at her with disapproval, but since she’s almost certain that he won’t slam her to the ground without Andor’s permission, she ignores him in favor of looking for the answers that weren’t in Andor’s profile.

No holos of any family. No personal datapad. No names sewn into his clothes or folded up scrip with a list of his enemies’ names (hey, she knew a woman who used to do that), there’s nothing here at all that’s in any way personally or – oh, hello, spare blaster. She hasn’t been able to lift one of those yet. It’s in good shape, too. Actually, it’s in excellent shape, considering that it’s an older model and the parts are probably a bitch to find.

Jyn glances over her shoulder. Andor stands straight as an arrow, his hands clasped tightly behind his back. General Angry-Face glowers at him (and, occasionally, over his shoulder at the thief crouching in his ship). To the side, the giant murder bot with an Imperial symbol on his shoulder and a rebel’s name on his programming watches her carefully.

Jyn takes the blaster.

She has a feeling Andor will understand.


End file.
